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Here's the story, in case you missed it: an Oklahoma state senator wants to pass a bill banning the use of aborted fetuses (which would include, under the bill's terms, stem-cell related materials) in food products, which I'm sure you didn't need to even Google first to realize has never been a thing, at all. He's doing this because there are no more wars and poverty anywhere in the world.

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In an act of angry, rebellious defiance of the establishment GOP dictating their preferred nominee, the voters of South Carolina got together and rallied around the guy who has a national approval rating slightly lower than the two different diseases he divorced his wives after they were diagnosed with.

As a liberal, I'm just confused at this point. It's like a violent clown car accident; I have no idea if crying or laughing, or both, is appropriate.

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At no point this year did the Republican Party team up with YouTube to do whatever the hell that goddamn stupid-ass bullshit four years ago was. So, good job, guys.

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The Public Editor is the person at a newspaper who questions what journalistic ethics the paper's reporters should follow. This week, the Public Editor of the New York Times asked, and by that he solicited reader opinions, if the Times' reporters should mention when someone if lying. In other words, this is A. something they are not doing already, B. something they're not actually sure is part of the job of being a news reporter, and C. what the fuck.

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Yeah, I wasn't letting this one go just because we had a break for the holidays and the primaries have started.

Looking back on it, I think I'm getting the point across here about PolitiFact's snotty and near-instantaneous immolation of its credibility. It's not just that they were wrong; it's that they pretty much bragged about how they didn't care. Long time readers of this strip may remember where it got its namesake- a reference to the same type of self-appointed "fact checkers" back in 2004 who decided that they were unbiased and infallible arbiters of truth because they registered a domain name.

It already appears that we may have just begun the most petty and juvenile election campaign in American history, and mainstays of our media are taking bold stances by determining if calling a candidate a poopyhead merits three or four arbitrary cartoon characters. The paper that brought down Nixon rates policy statements on a Pinocchio scale. Democracy is too good for us.

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This is, of course, why right-wingers are apoplectic this morning--because they know that no one cares about this. Romney can whine about it for a talking point, but at the end of it, he's whining that Obama put someone in charge of departments that stop rich people from screwing poor people over. Good luck with that buddy.

Oh, Iowa. This glorious day, this wonderful time, your moment to shine. It has come again.

Iowa! When just once each four years, we can find you on a map. Iowa! When once every four years, we know more about you than agriculture. Iowa! When every fourteen hundred days or so we all pretend you are the zeitgeist of America because you angrily legislate dominance over an entire election cycle out of selfish self-preservation of artificially lowered corn syrup prices, because that is the democracy the Founding Fathers ordered poor people to die for.

Iowa. Because that movie with the guy and the baseball players and Darth Vader guy.

Iowa? Yes, Iowa. Smug-faced urbanites vacationing in your quaint Holiday Inns, seeking your cow-laden backdrops, pretending that until this very moment they have never heard of nor seen this strange, perhaps religious, ceremony the natives call a "fair." They come with squires who carry strange boxes that they talk to, lest the boxes be angry and make their eternal youth go away, or in the worst cases make them talk about weather instead.

Iowa, as your golden complete lack of shores welcomes huddled masses yearing to break free of suit jackets. Rolled up sleeves and a loose tie, your official uniform of the sport known as "meeting the people!"

Iowa! Where in the last two weeks your entire statewide population of people with the last name Weigel has increased 100 percent.

I. Oh. Wah. When this morning a young child of a mere 63 years of age, who never truly grapsed that his fate, his legacy was determined before he was born merely by the act of his parents bestowing him the tribal god-helm uttered as "Wolf" by the tongues of the man-walkers, leaps from his bed to run downstairs and see what the harvest festival gods have left him in the night. It is a new monitor. A bigger monitor. Bigger than any that has been given to him before. And it has a touch screen. And holograms!

Iowa....

Iowa: because just once... just once, every four years, the government and the news media need to get together and just admit to our faces that the fate of the whole country rests entirely in the hands of a small group of old, angry, selfish white people.

And then tonight, we will all go to sleep, the wistful name still on our lips, slowly muting itself for another quadrennial rest. We shall dream great; we shall dream warm. We shall float endlessly on clouds that sing the name, Iowa.

Later, Mitt Romney gets the nomination in a walk because no fucking shit, everyone.

Happy Holidays, everyone.

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It's always weird taking different arguments made by right-wingers about the value of humans lives and putting them side by side. Conservative legislators, especially in Southern and border states, were arguing that fertilized embryos and fetuses should be classified as human beings with full rights while simultaneously wondering how best to maintain agricultural policies that took thousands of immigrants without any rights at all and maintained sub-standard wages for all of them. I suppose you could call it unfair to propose hiring fetuses as farm laborers, but hey, Republican candidates right now think we should get rid of child labor laws. So it's time Baby Zygote #4453-A (nickname "To Be Named Later") earned his or her keep.

This week's strip also wraps up Some Guy With a Website for the year. New cartoons will return in January, while I take a break from the obviously grueling charge of drawing a crude illustration every seven days. Yeah.

But that said, as always, thank you all for reading. I do this because you enjoy it, and if we can all maintain the charade that this cartoon is doinging even the remotest sliver of something good in some indiscript way, then who am I to kill hope. Happy holidays, everyone.

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It's unnerving that we have to explain this again, but since PolitiFact appears to be struggling with the relevant details, let's set the record straight again.

Medicare is a single-payer health care system offering guaranteed benefits to seniors. The House Republican budget plan intended to privatize the existing system and replace it with something very different -- a voucher scheme. It would still be called "Medicare," but it wouldn't be Medicare.

It seems foolish to have to parse the meaning of the word "end," but if there's a program, and it's replaced with a different program, proponents brought an end to the original program. That's what the verb means.

When Stephen Colbert premiered The Colbert Report, his first show put the word "truthiness" into the American lexicon. That's pretty much what PolitiFact did today.

What I find most offensive about this is how blase PolitiFact, and I imagine many of the news outlets that turned to them as reliable fact-checkers, accepted this as, well, acceptable. As if purposefully lying to maintain that faux aura of "balance" is the cost of being legitimate in the news world.

There shouldn't even be an argument about this: news organizations aren't supposed to make up things, even if they "feel" like they should be true. You don't get to "lie just once." This isn't a thing that PolitiFact should ever be excused for. We're not talking about a reporter getting a fact wrong and a need for a later correction: PolitiFact has spent almost an entire year ignorantly deflecting the numerous explanations of how they twisted logic to merely be right about a thing that wasn't. Today they doubled down on that and it ended their credibility, permanently.

PolitiFact did one thing: report facts. They officially no longer do this. Instead of blogs endlessly talking about how they "should be asahamed of themselves" they should simply stop linking to PolitiFact because they are now useless at the one thing they claim to offer. Big media companies don't link to LiveJournals or The Weekly World News either.

It will be interesting to see in the upcoming months which blogs and new organizations actually stick to their principles and acknowledge PolitiFact's loss of reliablity by finding a better source of facts. I know I'm no one in this game, but at least I have the credibility to declare that I'll never use that site as a source ever again.

Update: A relevant quote from Paul Krugman. If he's right--and sadly it looks like he is--today marks the official start of the 2012 election, one in which any politician is simply allowed to lie if they think they can get away with it. I find myself feeling incredibly sad.

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Last week the Obama administration decided to overrule the Food & Drug Administration, whose job is, primarily, to know how best to administer food and drugs, by maintaining a ban on over-the-counter sales of Plan B to girls under the age of 17, despite everyone who isn't running for re-election next year disagreeing with it. This is the first time in history that Health & Human Services has used its authority to override the FDA, which is just great, because there will never again be a Republican in the White House who now has precendent set for them to rule that they have better ideas about science than scientists.

Technically, the White House claimed this wasn't their call and was it was entirely the decision of HHS head Kathleen Sebelius, because that's a thing you believe if you're a stupid person. So basically, either the head of HHS ignored virtually unanimous rulings from experts about the safety and usefulness of making Plan B completely over the counter in an act of blatant politics-over-science, without informing the President about this, which means Sebelius should be fired, or President Obama just lied both just now and about his campaign promise to never put political ease over sound science, in which case he should, you know, stop being President right now.

In case I was being slightly vague on all this, the idea I'm presenting here is fuck you President Obama, you lying, cowering asshole. By far the greatest insult here is, of course, the thousands if not millions of young, scared girls who will suffer because of this, but a distant second is the insult levied to everyone in the country by your pretending that we all don't know exactly why this happened.

This is a perfect example of the cowardice that pisses off progressives. The administration that promised on Day One that they would not "put politics over policy" just blatantly went out of their way to craft policy that would prevent nasty political ads. We're running for office, for goodness sake, so I guess this time around the slogan is "Obama 2012: Women Are Slightly Less Politically Inconvenient To Us Than To Mitt Romney."

If he loses next year, it's because of things like this. And he'd deserve it.

There's only a few days left to buy some crap if you want it before Christmas. It's holiday time, meaning I physically abandon the place where the books are kept and mailed from after next week so... seriously. Last chance here.

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We're facing a party that over the last few years has fashioned itself into a home for people who want to find complete strangers and hurt them. I remember the days when these types of people were merely refered to as sociopaths.

The crazy PJ Media's article is a fascinating read into the self-delusional mind, by the way, fabricating a wonderous hypothetical social gathering where you can have a well-rehearsed diatribe ready to outwit an equally hypothetical liberal opponent. What I find so funny about it is that if I even actually was told anything remotely close to this, my immediate response would be "for someone trying to sound clever you sure sound like an idiot when you repeatedly forget how to pronounce the name of one of the two major political parties in this country."

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Republican voters are abandoning Herman Cain after all his infidelity issues and turning to Newt Gingrich, who has even more of them. This is because they don't actually care about Gingrich being an adulterer at all. They just care that Herman Cain doesn't annoy liberals as much as he used to because he's now a laughingstock.

This is also why the most right-wing, bible-thumping, hard-right crazypants that they should love in all respects, Rick Santorum, is getting less than a few percentage points in all the polls. Because he not only doesn't piss off liberals, he makes liberals laugh at him. Palin, Bachmann, Trump, Perry, Cain: they all plummeted from their perches for the same reason: they became jokes on The Daily Show.

Right-wingers want the most horrible person possible to be the Republican nominee, because being horrible to people pisses off liberals and that is what they actually care about.

Oh, hey, you have a little over a week to buy some crap if you want it before Christmas. So.... get on it, folks.

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So why isn't Rick Santorum a Tea Party darling? It's not because he lost his last election. It's not even because of the long-past-uninteresting Google bombing of his name (something that, by the way, would disappear in about a week if he actually became the Republican nominee and every news site in the world started mentioning him frequently). I hate that I have to keep pointing this out but the only reason Santorum isn't leading the polls is becasue he's not an asshole.

Now don't get me wrong, everything he stands for and most of what he proposes in the campaign is shitty and horrible, but that's not the same thing as being an asshole. Santorum isn't on TV telling the 99% to "go take a bath and get a job" or wondering if we can torture people, say, a second time because LOL torture. He doesn't do things that make Eric Erickson write posts about how "he's sure to piss off liberals" which is pretty much why everyone pretended Sarah Palin was going to be president for two years.

This is, of course, why Newt Gingrich is leading in polls right now. There are blog posts about how "he'll embarass Obama in the debates" which is right-wing lunatic speak for "he's an enormous asshole and will act like one on television." That's why they're abandoning Cain, because he's an adulterer, for Gingrich, who was an adulterer twice. They don't care. They just enjoy how much of an asshole Gingrich is. You know how last week, Mitt Romney put out an ad that lied about Obama saying something, and when called on it his campaign responded "well we don't care?" Yeah, that was a dogwhistle for "we are being assholes" and they were hoping that the Tea Party liked it.

It's not like I enjoy saying all this, people. This is just the awful truth of where we are as a nation. Hundreds of Republicans are going to gather in Iowa in about 30 days or so and decide who is the biggest enough asshole to make liberals feel bad the most. And that person will then have a 50% chance of having complete control of America's nuclear arsenal.

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There a lot of things to be thankful for, but as far as politics goes, I can't think of anything worth celebrating more than how wrong I was about Sarah Palin. In my wildest dreams I never would have imagined she would just suddenly disappear. Maybe I'm jinxing it--maybe she'll reappear in a few weeks with some bizarre new scheme or TV show, but for now, it's just amazing. No one gave her a show. She's done with the book tour. No one cared. No one does. No one will. Thank you, universe.

When I woke up a few mornings ago and it suddenly occured to me that the entire planet collectively stopped giving a damn about Palin almost overnight, I had only one observation about it, and it rang in my head over and over and over. I wanted desperately to make a comic out of it but the problem in my way was that it was sort of already a comic David Rees did a few years ago. So I addressed this the professional way: I asked David if I could steal his comic and he said sure, go ahead. David went as far as to say he would be "honored" if I did this, which I can only find both ironic and terribly, terribly backwards. Thanks, David.

And with that, Happy Thanksgiving. Next comic in two weeks.

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